Hello,
I am currently conducting research in a coastal area to assess carbon storage, with the study area covering both terrestrial zones and benthic habitats. My question is:
Can I use two different carbon models in InVEST simultaneously?
Specifically, the Carbon Storage and Sequestration model to evaluate green carbon in terrestrial areas such as agricultural land, shrubland, and forests; and the Coastal Blue Carbon model to assess carbon in ecosystems like mangroves, wetlands, and seagrass beds.
You can use them simultaneously, if you separate out the terrestrial land use/land cover classes from the blue carbon classes and run them through separate models. However, Blue Carbon works a bit differently from Carbon Storage, it’s more complex with its inputs of accumulation and disturbance, which you already have experience with. So if you do use both models, you’ll need to be clear in your reporting about how the model methods differ.
Or, you can use the Blue Carbon model for both terrestrial and coastal systems, if you’d like to just use one model instead of two. While Blue Carbon was originally designed to be applied to coastal ecosystems, it works fine for terrestrial ones too. But you would need to provide the accumulation and possibly disturbance data for more land use/land cover types.